Picks and Pans Review: Spotlight On...

MOVIES ARE FAMOUSLY GOOD AT MONSTERS and famously bad at real-life relationships. However, in Fools Rush In, the first big-screen vehicle for Friends' Matthew Perry, Hollywood may have gotten things right—at least to a point. In Fools boy (Perry) meets. girl (Salma Hayek); boy gets girl pregnant after a one-night stand in Vegas; boy marries girl in haste. Despite this recipe for disaster, the two eventually fall in love. If the movie, which opens on Valentine's Day, rings true, it's because the plot parallels the lives of producers Doug Draizin, 44, and Anna Maria Davis, 35. To a point.

Draizin and Davis met on a blind date in 1984, when he was a producer (Moving Violations) and she was just out of college. "It wasn't an attraction per se," says Davis. "It was more like a 'knowing.' I told my roommate, I think I'm going to get married to this guy." The couple were intimate only once (he says) or twice (she says) before Davis became pregnant. Draizin "went into shock," he says. But neither he nor Davis considered abortion. "That was the moment when I decided to grow up," he says. "I called the architect for the house I'd bought and said, 'You know the skylight room? Make it a nursery' " The couple married about four months later and had two more kids.

But life is never exactly like the movies. Davis felt her husband's friends dissed her because she is Hispanic and wasn't then in the film business. His long work hours also caused stress, and last year they reluctantly divorced. Today, Davis and Draizin, who sold their idea to Columbia for $50,000, are single and share custody of the kids. Getting married, says Draizin, "was the best decision I ever made."